Commercial vehicles, particularly commercial aircraft, involve a broad range of environmental operating conditions. Operating temperatures of such vehicles, having a multitude of components and systems, are critically important to their safety. It has become of increasing importance to continuously monitor normal operating temperatures in order to readily detect pre-defined abnormal temperature events as they occur. Such monitoring is frequently used to avoid fires or explosions, and/or control damage or loss of such vehicles and personnel utilizing those vehicles.
Protocols for fire detection and extinguishing methods are known, but are limiting in many ways. Currently, the practice on-board many aircraft is to use fixed trip-point, individual point or linear sensors to detect a fire, initiate an alarm or signal, and apply extinguishing methods. Current systems can only detect and respond to fires or smoke, and are not capable of monitoring the earlier abnormal temperature conditions that either caused the fires or represented early warning indicators of conditions that could lead to fires or explosions. There is a need for temperature sensing systems that provide extensive temperature and abnormal temperature location data covering large areas of large commercial aircraft. There is also a need for a comprehensive and intelligent system that provides real-time detection of these abnormal temperature conditions before they result in fires or explosions incurring irreparable damage. There is further a need for a system that establishes archival normative temperature profiles about various systems, equipment, and areas of the aircraft during normative and stable operations. Consequently, any deviation of a particular normal temperature profile, such as a power supply unit, can be characterized as abnormal, real-time alerts issued and communicated to proper personnel, resulting in an orderly procedure to abate a possibly hazardous situation. Finally, there is a need for a system for extensive logging, archiving, data storage and analysis to facilitate personnel on-board the aircraft or on the ground to resolve abnormal temperature situations using archived and real-time information simultaneously. Such a system would vastly exceed the capability and functionality of currently available flight data recorders and sensors currently in use in commercial aviation.
The present invention is provided to solve the problems discussed above and other problems, and to provide advantages and aspects not provided by prior temperature monitoring devices. A full discussion of the features and advantages of the present invention is deferred to the following detailed description, which proceeds with reference to the accompanying drawings.